I’ve been using StatCounter for years because it completely free and it also has invisible counters.  Invisible counters are great because your visitors wont need to know that you are monitoring them.  StatCounter has tons of great tools like viewing highest ranked Search Engine searches, where visitors came from, the countries visitors came from, the amount of time spent on your site, returning visitors and much much more. The most important one of course is the number of unique views that your site may get.  You want to try to maximize the number of unique views in order to maximize the amount of money that you can get from your sites.

Below is a graph of a sample statistic from StatCounter:

As you can tell, WebsiteJourney isn’t currently getting a lot of hits but this graph gives a lot of great information.  The unique visitors tells you how many people visited your site, the page views shows how  many pages were viewed during the day and returning visitors tells you how many people came back to your site again.  Its all pretty self intuitive but it gives a lot of good information.

To get started with StatCounter, you must first create an account by visiting http://www.statcounter.com.  Once you have created an account you will need to create a project with information about your blog.  Different projects allow you to monitor different sites or pages as you wish.  It will keep the statistics between them separated.  After you have created a project just look for the basic HTML installation instructions which will give you some HTML code to copy and paste into your own page.

Copy the HTML code displayed on the screen.  It should start with <!– Start of StatCounter Code –> and end with <!– End of StatCounter Code –>.  After you have copied this into your clipboard, log into your WordPress Blog’s Admin section.  Navigate to Appearance > Editor.  On the right side, look for a file name “Footer” or one that is similar.  The filename varies with different themes.  After you have located “Footer”, click it and you should see HTML in the box.  Paste the StatCounter Code right above the </html> tag and save the file.

Thats it! Now when you have visitors, it will log the number of visitors and various other information about them.

Once the blog has unique content, you can begin different SEO Techniques that will help your site get found by various search engines.

1. If your site isn’t currently index, submit your site to various search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.  Search engines is where over 90% of your traffic will come from and it is important to advertise the blog to at least these 4 search engines.  Most traffic originates from these 4 search engines so this should be enough to cover you.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addur
Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
Ask: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=<Insert Your URL>

2. Download the “All In One SEO” plugin for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ This plugin will help set up different metadata and titles to make them all search engine friendly.  This is a quick easy step to changing the titles, metadata, keywords and much more.  The friendlier your site is the more the search engines will crawl through your site.  You want to make it as easy as possible for search engines.

3. Download the “Google Sitemap Generator” for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ This plugin basically creates a sitemap of all your blog posts and content for Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines to easily get access to.  The sitemap contains all of the links on your site and is an easy to parse formula for the search engines.  My Website Journey’s Sitemap can be viewed to see what type of information is generated by this plugin and seen by Google.

WordPress can be obtained by visiting http://wordpress.org/.  Download the latest version and extract the contents into your webserver’s directory.  After you have extract the contents to your webserver’s folder.  Navigate to the home directory and a page should come up stating that a configure file is required.  Click to configure your WordPress blog and input your database information (Database, server, login, password).  If you click next and you come up with the same prompt again, that means that your file permissions aren’t set correctly.

Apache usually runs on a different username to keep separate from any of the regular files.  This is so if you site gets hijacked, the hacker won’t have permissions to make changes to any vital files.  Also because of these strict permissions, it is important to make sure that any page that you host has both read and write permissions.  Wordpress requires the write permission to create the configuration files.

Now that you were able to configure your WordPress Blog successfully, it will prompt you for a Blog title.  For me I filled out “Ultimate Popcorn Blog” and my site was created!  The basic theme for the WordPress Blog will look a little bland so the first thing that I did was download a new theme for my WordPress blog.  If you visit http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/, there are thousands of different WordPress themes that are all available for free.  Once you download one, you just need to extract the contents of the compressed file into /wp-content/theme/.  After you have uploaded the theme, you can navigate to the Appearance section within your WordPress Admin page to switch between themes.

Thats all there is to creating a WordPress blog.  It is very easy and is a great way to get your first website started.  I just created my first website on my Burst.net hosting and I will be working on getting traffic to the site and I’ll keep everyone updated.  In the meantime, check out my new website at http://www.popcornblogs.com/